Well… what you are going to see below is not a research… This is a Saturday morning… my family is not in Bangalore and I am really bored. I don’t know why, but I am in “how to kill my time” mood. I am using Windows Live Writer. If I think the result is any good, I am going to hit that publish button. The theme is, “What do these search engines suggest for auto completion?” This isn’t my idea. I saw something similar to this in Facebook, and I thought it would be fun to do some tests of my own ... [More]

Recently, I installed MS Office 2010 RTM and along with all the “cool” features, I got something which took me by surprise. The Local Disk (Q). I wasn’t really sure if I got affected by some kind of virus. Take a look at my drives… I tried, “Ejecting” this drive but couldn’t. I tried getting into this drive and all I could get was “Access Denied”. Disk Management utility didn’t even talk about this Q Drive. After a little research found that this was because of Application Virtualization ... [More]

I will tell you about my hardware setup and the reason why I am posting this. I am sure I am not alone who has faced this!!! I have a laptop with 4GB RAM and I wanted to use this as my SharePoint development environment. The first question was the choice of OS – Windows 7 or Windows 2k8 R2 Server. I decided to go with Windows 7 for obvious reasons and very soon realized that if I install all the beta products (SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010 beta being the minimum) tha... [More]

Problem> There is a binary file (I’ll use an Excel file) that you want to embed in any C# assembly. Later on, at runtime, you want to extract the file from the EXE and continue working on it. In this post, I will share the code and describe how you can do that. You can use the same technique for any other kind of binary file as well. Solution> First up, the reason why you may choose to embed a resource directly into your EXE is to ensure that no one tampers your file on which your code is... [More]

Do you notice anything special in the list below? If you have been working with Perfmon enough, you will notice that the Process Counters are missing in the list below. Download a utility called Extensible Counter List from this link…. and run it. Select PerfProc and ensure that Performance Counters Enabled is checked. If it is not checked, check it. If you are not getting this checkbox at all, run this tool as an Administrator and you should be able to see it. Restart Perfmon after clo... [More]

This post is a continuation of this article. Scenario 9:Find out total count of different errors in your HTTP Error Log file on any IIS Server Answer: Logparser "select sc-status, s-reason, cs-uri, count(*) from 'FolderName\*.log' to 'FolderName\Total.csv' Group by s-reason, sc-status, cs-uri" -o:CSV -i:HTTPERR If you want to just see the different types of errors coming up… use the following… Logparser "select s-reason, count(*) from 'FolderName\*.log' to 'FolderName\Total.c... [More]

In part 1 of this series, I provided the BaseLine counter set for Windows 2k3. To close this loop for Win 2008, I am providing one more set of baseline counters for IIS. Download the following template and extract the XML file - IIS-BaseLine-Win-2k8.zip.     Start –> Run –> Perfmon     Right click on Data Collector Sets –> User Defined –> Select New –> Data Collector Set     Give a name, and ensure Create from a te... [More]

In the last couple of posts you’ve seen collection and manual analysis of Performance data. In this post let’s automate the analysis using one of the really fantastic tools called PAL – Performance Analysis of Logs. Download it from CodePlex. Ensure that you have installed all the pre-requisites… 1. Log Parser 2.2 Log parser is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Win... [More]

In my previous post, I have shown the configuration of perfmon counters. Let’s talk about how to analyze it now. Before you do anything else, read the following articles… IIS 6 Performance Counters Suggested Performance Counters to Watch (IIS 6.0) ASP.NET Performance Counters I know it is a lot of stuff to go through, but then to master drawing, you must learn about the brushes! To manually monitor some counters, you must add the .blg file that got created earlier when you stopped... [More]

If you consider troubleshooting as an art, Perfmon will be one of the brushes – almost like sable. If you master it well, you can not only tell a lot about your server’s performance, you will also be able to take a lot of actions pro-actively even before anything breaks down. In this post, let me quickly show how you can create various counters and set it up on your IIS/SharePoint Servers.     Click Start –> Run –> Perfmon (Click Ok)     Right click... [More]